ABOUT
Jack Bailey is a contemporary landscape artist based in Byron Bay whose work exists somewhere between photography and dream. Working across large-format still works and screen-based moving image installation, he isolates fractal moments from the broader environmental panorama, vignettes that feel vaguely familiar, buried in the psyche. Each work is a meditative portal to the natural world.
Still works are presented without glass in locally reclaimed timber, designed to extend the experience outward into the surrounding environment. His moving image practice (a growing focus) brings this same landscape into the world as screen-based installations, immersive and alive in ways a still image cannot be.
Before art, Bailey spent years in design and advertising, eventually becoming a creative director in the USA. In 2013 he walked away from Los Angeles and embarked on a solo four-month journey through Alaska in an old single-cab Toyota Hilux — camera in hand for the first time. He followed that with a month in Tasmania/Lutruwita, where the images became his first exhibition, LUTRUWITA.
Travel to wild and remote landscapes across the world is central to his practice, it is only in truly untouched places that the work finds its source material.
Since 2015, Bailey has presented his work in solo exhibitions that regularly sell out. His film work has earned recognition at the Byron Bay International Film Festival, winning Best Experimental Film for CONTINUUM (2019) and HORSE (2023).
Artist Statement
ATMOSPHERE
\A considered exploration of the beauty of darkness, and the brilliance of light.
The duality of the dance, and the purpose it serves. A vague understanding of precarious balance.
My journey has been a sporadically focused effort to better understand cause and effect, to dissect the molten perspective formed by decades of conflicting information, cast downstream from trusted guides. A puritanical need to eject the overwhelming inner dialogue that shapes my point of view.
My practice gives me permission to honour, celebrate and serve the less glossy moments. The delicious black atoms that, despite their heavy presence, dance so delicately, and if removed, would render my vision bland, homogenised, void of emotion, atmosphere, connection and consequence.
It is these shadowed moments, lying beneath obvious beauty, that offer me comfort through warm familiarity.
I have always felt an uncommon affinity with places dark, ancient and unbroken. I find solace in empty landscapes, void of human interference:
Raw.
Rugged.
Elemental.
I find the company of the wild far more affable than that of modern man.
"The more time spent removed from the mediocrity of society, the less we depend upon it."